The Wired Oscars: Who Should Really Win at the 85th Academy Awards

Granted, the Academy had some trouble on the way while attempting to navigate the newfangled technology that is the internet, but the moment has arrived nonetheless: It's Oscar night. The 85th annual Hollywood self-celebration kicks off this evening at 8:30 p.m. EST, and while we can't actually predict who's going to win — and after Nate Silver has entered the game, why bother? — we can tell you who we think really deserves to take home the shiniest, baldest symbols of Hollywood popularity in all the major categories. Check out our picks in the gallery, share your own in the comments, and tune in tonight to see how reality measures up.

Best Movie: Zero Dark Thirty

Actually picking a "best movie" of a given year is a nonsense game. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder; classics take time to reveal themselves, and there's no way of knowing for sure that the actual best film won't languish in obscurity, only to be discovered by grandkids who will scoff at our philistinism and ignorance. So the Best Picture Oscar isn't really about picking the best movie of the year. Instead, it's about finding a great movie that somehow speaks clearly and powerfully to the America of right now. A film that reflects or dictates a zeitgeist, that captures the moment, that shows us to ourselves with honesty and eloquence. For better or worse, Zero Dark Thirty is that film for 2012.

Everything about Zero Dark Thirty is attuned to our consciousness as a people: the incredibly strange pace of our lives where our years feel condensed into minutes but seconds impatiently stretch to feel like hours; the obsessiveness with which we fixate on villains, icons, dramatizations of good and evil to distract ourselves from the cold, technocratic, self-perpetuating war of information and death surrounding us; the uncomfortable shifting sands of gender relations in our society of strong, successful women who nevertheless struggle through a sea of isolation, suspicion, and skewed expectations that they themselves are reluctant to admit exists.

Bigelow and Boal's film unassumingly encompasses all of these issues, presenting them through deceptively lean storytelling and world-beating ensemble acting, planting ideas and questions in moments of strange ambiguity and tension. Argo may be how we appear to ourselves on the surface, but Zero Dark Thirty cuts through to the bone and pulls out the marrow, showing us what's really going on underneath. As upsetting as it may be to admit, this is the film of the moment, and the Best Picture of the year.
— Jason Michelitch

Photo: Sony/Columbia Pictures

Best Actor: Daniel Day-Lewis

It took a mogul of Steven Spielberg's stature to get $65 million spent making a film about legislative maneuvers, built entirely on long scenes of dialogue, but it took Daniel Day-Lewis to actually make it work. Despite excellent writing, sturdy direction, and striking cinematography, Lincoln rests almost entirely on the shoulders of its lead performer. Day-Lewis's interpretation of the iconic bearded president is enrapturing, riveting, captivating -- all those five-dollar adjectives that mean the same thing: You cannot look away from this incredible performance, miraculously suspended between myth and man. A quiet, high-pitched voice at home telling quaint anecdotes that on a dime can thunder forth with ultimate authority; a tall, imposing stature that hides itself in slouches, loping strides, subtle gestures; a face that is destined to be carved into the side of a mountain co-exists with a face that is constantly shifting between wistful delight and craft calculation, between stark determination and deep, painful sorrow.

It is so compelling to merely watch Day-Lewis when he is still -- watch him listening, watch him feeling, thinking, planning -- that it is startling how physical his performance can become. When this Lincoln crawls on the floor to stoke a fire or be with his son, it is so charming and thrilling and unexpected that you cannot ever again think of the 16th president as a classical, stalwart hero figure or a stodgy speech-giver. He is a spidery figure full of weird energy calling to mind the great Jeremy Brett's interpretation of Sherlock Holmes, another role requiring an actor to somehow show through his face that he is thinking seven times faster than anyone else in the room. When Day-Lewis speaks, lengthy, complex speeches that break all the rules of modern screenwriting flow past us as naturally as running water. He is simply a joy to experience in every mode of being, at every moment of the film.

From the moment we are introduced to Lincoln in private repose, lanky body stretched between chair and bed, foot propped unceremoniously on a bedpost, casually knocking on his head as he asks his wife "How's the coconut?" our attention cannot flag for a minute. The film has us to do with as it pleases, because we dare not miss a moment of time with this remarkable presence. Day-Lewis's Oscar is all but preordained, our naming him here neither daring nor original. But sometimes conventional wisdom gets it right. -Jason Michelitch

Best Actress: Jennifer Lawrence

This year's Best Actress race is one of the most heated in recent memory — mostly because in addition to having both the oldest and youngest nominees ever, it is also just a solid bunch of nominees from beginning to end. But at the end of the night, it's Jennifer Lawrence who should be holding a little gold man (and not just because she'll probably do something awkward like call him a "naked statue").

First of all, Lawrence's performance as the widowed Tiffany in Silver Linings Playbook is incredible. Her ability to go slalom from humor to heartbreak to verbally laying out Robert De Niro is pretty much flawless and exudes that "it" quality that simply can't be taught. Second, it's just her year. She's been nominated for Best Actress before — for 2010's Winter's Bone — and she easily could've won for that performance. But she lost to Natalie Portman for Black Swan. It was Portman's year. This one is Lawrence's. And like Portman before her, she's mastering the art of mixing smart indie films with geek-friendly fare (Portman was Padmé, Lawrence is Mystique and Katniss Everdeen), making her a lethal cocktail of awesome.

In a year when Hollywood, and the people who watch its movies, really decided to start getting excited about women (women!) headlining films, Lawrence lead the charge. Is that enough of a reason to give her an Oscar, considering she's nominated for her Silver Linings role and not her heroine one as Katniss and she's up against Jessica Chastain's real-world hero in Zero Dark Thirty? Probably not. But her turn as Tiffany was impeccable and filled with a tough vulnerability that eclipses her very worthy fellow nominees, and it happened to come at the end of her most prolific year yet. The odds are ever in her favor.
— Angela Watercutter

Photo: The Weinstein Company

Best Supporting Actor: Matthew MacFayden, Anna Karenina

Oh, sure, you could reward Alan Arkin for wasting his talent, or Tommy Lee Jones for the bravery of wearing a terrible wig. You could give Robert De Niro a gold star for actually bothering to be awake while performing for the first time in years. You could applaud Christoph Walz for being insanely charming or Philip Seymour Hoffman for being one of our finest living actors, if, y'know, you're into that kind of thing.

I'm sure you all have plenty of perfectly logical reasons for your own Best Supporting Actor pick. But me, I don't know from logic. I only know that I want that gold statue in the hands of Prince Stepan "Stiva" Arkadyevich Oblonsky, as embodied by Matthew MacFayden of the BBC. Because I saw a lot of great movies this year, but my favorite ten minutes spent in a theater were the first 10 minutes of Joe Wright's Anna Karenina, and in my memory those minutes are mainly filled with Mr. MacFayden making stupendously hilarious faces and pirouetting in and out of various coats. If you don't understand the last part of that sentence, well, the first 10 minutes of Karenina are a very special piece of cinema that have to be experienced to be understood. There are a lot of moving parts (emphasis on moving) that go into making Karenina one of the most strangely kinetic and thrillingly alive films of the year, but it is MacFayden's performance, nearly that of a great silent comedian, which lingers most fondly in my memory.
— Jason Michelitch

Photo: Universal Pictures/Focus Features

Best Supporting Actress: Anne Hathaway

Oh, Anne Hathaway. As Fantine in Les Misérables she's meant to be the saddest sack in a pretty bleak story to begin with. (A haircut hasn't been this traumatic since V for Vendetta.) But, ironically, her gut-wrenching performance actually ends up being the shining-est moment in an otherwise uneven film. (Les Mis was good, but not really great.)

That said, Hathaway is another strong performance up against some tough competition — most notably from Amy Adams in The Master and Sally Field in Lincoln. But, frankly, none of them have Hathaway's pipes. A lot of hay has been made about all of the live singing director Tom Hooper required to make his film adaptation of the classic musical, and while it works better for some than others (see: Adam Lambert's side-eye), it's lightning in a bottle for Hathaway. Her rendition of "I Dreamed a Dream" was the best three-ish minutes of the 2.5 hours of Misérables, and the moment when the life falls out of her eyes at the end of the last note is reason enough to give her the Oscar.

And, frankly, the Academy owes her one for all the work she put in hosting the Oscars telecast with James Franco in 2011.
— Angela Watercutter

Photo: Universal Pictures

Best Adapted Screenplay: David Cronenberg, Cosmopolis

Farihah Zaman recently described the experience of Cosmopolis as one akin to having a robot ejaculate into your skull. She didn't mean it as a compliment, but I enthusiastically agreed. David Cronenberg's adaptation of Don DeLillo's novel is a linguistic horrorshow, hyper-verbal and bent on destruction of your parietal lobe. The angular, serpentine dialog crawls into your brain and starts re-ordering your neurons. The structure of the film, which takes place largely inside a limousine traveling at a snail's pace across Manhattan in order to deliver its young billionaire passenger to his favorite barber, defeats every instinct your mind has about how to access or make sense of a film's plot. The film's major events — sex, violence, a massive anti-capitalist protest, an assassination plot (or two?) — all slide into the film sideways, unexpected, sometimes barely perceived and never anticipated.

By the end, you're left simply taking in words and images as if they are subliminal smoke signals from a distant alien civilization: You know there's communication occurring, but you can't figure out what you're being told. Later you discover the answer hidden in the back of your subconscious, but it's in a language you can't read. Cronenberg continues to be unlike any other figure in film, and as much as he is a great director, he has always been a fascinating screenwriter, and on that front this is his finest work.
— Jason Michelitch

Photo: Entertainment One

Best Cinematography: Skyfall, Roger Deakins

The surprising thing about Skyfall didn't have anything to do with the plot, or the performances, or the revelations about Bond's history. Instead, it was how beautiful the movie looked, and how unobtrusive that beauty was. There are shots in the movie that are just perfect, amazing moments of composition and color, and yet as amazing as they are, the movie doesn't slow down to smugly point out them out; it just powers on with the story.

Two scenes in particular stand out: Firstly, the fight with the assassin in the Shanghai office building, lit by neon images outside and mirrored across myriad glass surfaces, a choice that makes metaphor — spies working in the shadows, and Bond reflecting about himself and the nature of his work — into visual reality without impacting the intensity of the fight itself. And then, the calm majesty of the Skyfall reveals itself. Perhaps the most visually self-indulgent moment of the movie, it's nonetheless something that's wonderfully evocative of the real Highlands. Both cold and harsh while also natural and inviting, the sheer amount of space in each shot simultaneously contrasts the busyness of the earlier urban settings and evokes Bond's existential loneliness.

Roger Deakins' Skyfall work is, fittingly, just like Bond himself: Quietly efficient, entirely professional and utterly deadly. Here's to the Academy giving him some credit for that.
-Graeme McMillan

Photo: Columbia Pictures

Best Director: Michael Haneke, Amour

There are plenty of reasons to award the Best Directing oscar to Michael Haneke, the 70-year-old auteur who has spent the last two decades becoming one of the most celebrated directors in the world. He has won the Palme D'Or twice, one of only eight filmmakers to have ever done so, and his most recent win was for Amour, the film under consideration this Sunday. His work displays an artful control that most other directors can merely dream of, and there can be little doubt that of the nominated directors, his is the most assured and original cinematic vision.

Normally, there would be little chance of a director such as Haneke actually winning an Academy Award for directing, but this is a strange year for the category. The anointed favorite, Steven Spielberg, has seen his film's chances for Best Picture fade away, and with it his status as inevitable winner. Last year saw the first time a European director working outside the Hollywood system was awarded Best Director, and it's just embarrassing to think of Michel Hazanavicius winning an Oscar and Michael Haneke being passed over. It would be nice if the Academy voters seized this glorious moment of confusion as an opportunity to class up the Oscar ceremony significantly.
— Jason Michelitch

Photo: Sony Pictures Classics

Best Original Screenplay: Quentin Tarantino, Django Unchained

The story of slave-turned-bounty-hunter-turned-freedman Django and his journey to rescue his wife, Broomhilda, from bondage — along with his mentor dentist-turned-bounty-hunter Dr. King Schultz — Django Unchained is a Quentin Tarantino movie through and through, with diverse genre influences ranging from spaghetti Westerns to blaxploitation films, to John Woo's bullet ballets. You can view it as a revenge movie, a Western, or a straightforward action movie as Django takes down an array of evil slave owners and overseers on the way to his goal. But at its heart, Django Unchained is a new interpretation of an old legend, and a movie about how far someone is willing to go for love.
Set during one of the most painful times in America's history, it walks a fine line between thoughtful, exploitative, exciting, and somber. Tarantino pulls no punches in the script, but focuses not only on the suffering, but the deep love that Django feels for his wife. That Tarantino managed to stick the landing on that complicated trick is impressive. Django Unchained is a love story that seems divisive (and uncomfortable) at first glance, but ultimately depicts a feeling that we all know and hold dear.
— David Brothers

Photo: The Weinstein Company

Best Animated Feature: ParaNorman

Let's be honest; if the Oscars predictors out there are right, ParaNorman's win might be a long shot. It's up against the Pixar might of Brave and the Tim Burton-iness of Frankenweenie. But in a really new category like Best Animated Feature (est. 2002), it would be wonderful to see experimental winners like the folks at Laika, who used all kinds of 3-D printing and stop-motion techniques to make ParaNorman. It would be nice, in Hollywood especially, if innovators and early adopters were celebrated early and often.

That said, the entire crop of nominees in this years Best Animated Feature category are experimenters in their own right — from the folks at Aardman Animations who made the stop-motion The Pirates! Band of Misfits to Disney's smart videogame tale Wreck-It Ralph. It's a great list of films, it would just be nice to have the little clairvoyant known as Norman come out on top.
— Angela Watercutter

Best Music (Original Song): "Skyfall" from Skyfall, Music and Lyric by Adele Adkins and Paul Epworth

I'll admit it: On first listen, Adele's "Skyfall" disappointed. It felt as if it didn't go that extra distance, that it was too restrained, too aware of its own tastefulness. And then I saw it being used in the movie. Strangely, everything that had made me uncertain about the song before suddenly worked in context. Combined with giving the opener's traditional hallucinatory visuals, the song's restraint worked in its favor, with Adele's vocals hitting just the right level of melodrama and patented melancholic desperation. And the callbacks to earlier Bond music, with the orchestration recalling John Barry in its swoop and fall, fell entirely with the movie's own re-use of Bond iconography and mythology.

"Skyfall" the song ended up being the perfect preview for Skyfall the movie: something informed by — and respectful of — its place in a long lineage, but able to stand on its own terms as well; something that was at once classic and contemporary, and left you wanting more by the time it was over. When it comes to original songs written especially for movies this year, it's pretty much unmatched.
— Graeme McMillan

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